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"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

A Few Historic Trends: 25 Years Of Wolverine Basketball

This week’s diary is mainly designed to graph out some of the trends in box score statistics (and a few derived from the box score) that we have seen over the last 25 seasons of Michigan basketball. What I hoped to achieve here was merely to provide a visual for the increases and decreases in these statistics over time, but also to look at the averages in this period to get some idea of how well the current team is performing compared to the last, well, several teams. It is important to note that all totals for the current team are to date – I didn’t want to do a projection of future totals simply because of the potential error that would be part of that projection.

TABLE 1 – COMPARISON OF CERTAIN AVERAGES

1988-2012

Current Team

FG%

45.80%

50.50%

3PT%

35.10%

40.20%

FT%

70.80%

70.50%

Rebounds / Game

35.6

36.4

Assists /Game

14.2

15.4

Points Per Game

71.9

77.8

Offensive Eff.

1.008

1.181

Defensive Eff.

0.993

0.915

Off. Rebound %

31.80%

31.40%

Def. Rebound %

68.80%

74.60%

It should be noted (hence the italics) that the data for efficiency was only available for the past 16 seasons, so bear this in mind when looking at the above figures. That being said, you can see from this quick comparison that the current team is performing markedly above the combined average of the 24 teams which came before it, and it is arguably on track to fall under the historic average for statistics such as turnovers and personal fouls, and about on average for blocks and steals.

The charts below are admittedly exaggerated via some varied scaling in order to show clearly some of the cycles and trends in some of the statistics. I will apologize in advance for this, but it seemed like a good way to show this.

For example, you can see average rebounds per game on a trend of general decline for years, bottoming out over the last few seasons before a definite recovery in this season:

You can see with average assists per game several cycles of varied length, but another generally steady downward turn from the 90s through the last few seasons:

In average points per game, there was a very protracted trend of general decline (with noted spikes) that seemed to get reasonably flat at time wore on. Again, this year, the trend is reversing.

Looking at offensive and defensive efficiency, you will see that, most years, we hung out somewhere around 1.000 for offensive efficiency, but have had widely varied performance on defense. A similar tale can be told for offensive and defensive rebound %, but here, it is defensive rebounding % which is relatively stable in comparison to its counterpart. This is less obvious when looking at rebound totals for the season, of course.

On this chart, you’ll find field goal percentage, three-point percentage and free throw percentage trends so you can see the interplay between the three. Free throw shooting and field goals seemed to actually be relatively stable over time, with our three-point percentage being by far the most variable aspect of our shooting offense.

Here are the trends for turnovers, blocks, personal fouls and steals.

TL;DR CONCLUSION:

I am not sure there is a fixed conclusion here only because the current season is not yet finished, but no it is even clear in the numbers that, at least in a few important regards, Michigan basketball is coming back to levels of production and play that it has not seen in quite some time. We can see it on the court, but the statistics definitely do back up the so-called “eye test” comparisons we tend to make of this team.